Student Work

Photography (BFA)

Bayley Resetar

The Many Mysteries of Me

The Many Mysteries of Me is a piece dedicated to my father, Martin Michael Resetar. My parents divorced when I was very young. I had a complex relationship with my fathera relationship that was still somewhat unresolved before his death. He passed away in 2017 from lung cancer. After his death, we discovered a box of objects that he kept hidden in a storage locker. My father was an extreme minimalist, and he barely kept anything other than furniture in his apartment. He was also not the most emotionally expressive person on the planet, so when I found this box filled with things that he saved that had to do with my mom and my siblings, I began to grapple with discovering a side I did not know he had. In my piece, the original objects exist in a manipulated video of found footage from the seven years I lived with my father. The video is manipulated to reflect the structure of my memory of my father, somewhat indecipherable but constant. The video is embedded in a box similar to that in which I found the objects. The intention of this work is to try to understand who my father was to me and what he has become since his passing. I am exploring his inability to reveal his vulnerability. I am attempting to understand what he could never verbalize to us through what he has left behind.